Car driven into crowd outside primary school in China

Multiple injuries are feared after a car was driven into a crowd of people outside a primary school in China’s southern Hunan province.

State media said “several students and adults were injured and fell to the ground”, and several people were hospitalised, but a police statement later said there were no life-threatening injuries.

The driver of the vehicle – identified as a white SUV – was caught by parents and school security officers and handed over to police.

This is the third attack on a crowd in China in a week, and it has fuelled concerns about public safety.

“About a dozen people were hit, some of them seriously, but luckily the ambulance came very quickly,” Mr Zhu, a parent of one of the children at the school, told the BBC.

He said he heard the attack just as he was leaving the school premises, after dropping off his eight-year-old.

“Six or seven parents had forced the car of the person who hit others to stop. Even the security guard was knocked down. The guard is quite old, in his 70s or 80s, and couldn’t do much,” he said.

The school has been identified as the Yong’an Primary School in Dingcheng District in Hunan province.

Video from the scene posted on a private WeChat account showed some children lying on the ground, while others, carrying school bags, were fleeing in panic.

Another video filmed soon after the incident showed an angry pedestrian hitting the SUV with a snow shovel while the driver was still inside.

The driver is then seen stepping out of the other side of the vehicle, only to be surrounded by bystanders who started beating him with sticks.

Similar attacks in recent days have sparked discussions online about the social phenomenon of “taking revenge on society“, where individuals act on personal grievances by attacking strangers.

On Saturday eight people were killed and 17 others were wounded in a knife attack at a vocational school in eastern China. Police said the suspect was a 21-year-old former student at the school who was meant to graduate this year but had failed the exam.

Before that, on 12 November, at least 35 people were killed in a car attack in southern China, when a man ran into groups of people exercising on a sports track.

And in October, in Shanghai, a man killed three people and wounded 15 others in stabbing at a supermarket.

According to police records, there have been 19 incidents of indiscriminate violence in China this year in which the perpetrator was not known to the victims. Sixty-three people have been killed and 166 injured in these attacks. This is a sharp increase on previous years – 16 killed and 40 injured in 2023, for instance.

While the incidents are still sporadic and rare, they are high-profile. And the videos that often circulate soon after on social media have prompted concern and fear among people.

“These are symptoms of a society with a lot of pent-up grievances,” Lynette Ong, distinguished professor of Chinese politics at Canada’s University of Toronto, told AFP.

“Some people resort to giving up. Others, if they’re angry, want to take revenge.”

A slowing economy, high youth unemployment and a property crisis that has hurt savings have led to increasing uncertainty about the future among Chinese people.

Ong said, in the circumstacnes, violent attacks were the “negative side of the same coin”.

President Xi Jinping has ordered local officials to ensure the safety and “social stability” of communities and to “strictly prevent extreme cases”.

Officials are keen to show they are acting quickly. They worry that such a high number of casualties in a single year could raise questions about China’s safety record, further alarming people and even discouraging tourism.

The Communist Party has rapidly expanded surveillance in recent years and after the car attack last week in Zhuhai, there have been further orders to deploy local officials and community workers to try to prevent unrest.